Dyslexia Research validates our Dyslexia treatment.

New research supports how Focused Education tutors Dyslexic children in Perth.

New research shows that dyslexia is a disorder that causes difficulty in the language-processing area of the brain. This type of disorder is considered to be a “phonological impairment”.

The learning or dyslexia impairment makes the ability to recognize different pronunciations of the same word difficult.

This power creates our ability for voice recognition and causes words to seem familiar to us.

For people suffering from dyslexia, these experiences are not common and often create confusing situations involving reading and writing.

At Focused Education we love helping Perth children with Dyslexia. We hope that you find our research below helpful and informative.

“Phono” is the Latin root for sound, therefore; a “phonological impairment” is the difficulty (impairment) of sound or hearing. An unimpaired brain can depict sensitive differences in the phonetics of a person’s voice and hear what makes their speech unique. A dyslexic brain is unable to distinguish the individual phonetics of words so much that a person who suffers from the disorder may not even understand what language is being spoken.

Tyler Perrachione with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) says:

“Even though all people who speak a language use the same words, they say those words just a little bit differently from one another; what is called ‘phonetics’ in linguistics.

It is remarkable that individuals with dyslexia are no better able to identify voices speaking a familiar language than a foreign one. It is also very interesting that the reason for this is that they are less accurate at voice recognition than individuals who don’t have dyslexia.”

MIT scientists conducted a study in which people with and without dyslexia were coached to recognize the voices of people speaking either a familiar language, English, or a foreign Language, Mandarin Chinese.

The participants listened to 5 cartoon avatars with unique voices speak in the two languages. In the end, the participants were tested on their ability to identify and connect the avatar to its’ correct voice.

The participants without dyslexia were average readers for their age. The participants with dyslexia were known to suffer from reading difficulties and experienced other symptoms of dyslexia. The results of the study showed that participants with dyslexia were significantly worse at correctly identifying the avatar’s voices in the familiar language, English. Both participating groups failed to correctly identify the avatar voices in the foreign language, Chinese.

Many upcoming theories in dyslexia research discuss the idea that the “phonological impairment” may also create difficulty for the brain to associate a picture with a word.

This symptom is demonstrated by poor test taking abilities by individuals with dyslexia. The dyslexic brain is unable to decode words and creates intense reading difficulties.

Perrachione continues:

“Our results are the first to explicitly link impairment in reading ability to impairment in ecologically processing spoken language. The results suggest that the source of a phonological deficit might be in dyslexic individuals’ difficulties learning the consistent properties of speech sounds as spoken by an individual talker.

Lots of research has shown that individuals with dyslexia have more trouble understanding speech when there is noise in the background. These results suggest that trouble following a specific voice might be part of the cause.

Teachers and other educators can be sensitive to this during classroom instruction where noise from other classmates might make it disproportionately difficult for children with dyslexia to follow what is going on in a lesson.”

If research continues to expand upon Perrachione’s study and continues to find developments in the theory, a new door could be opened for the treatment of dyslexia.

Further research could uncover a true direction for slowing or stopping language issues as early as possible. A cure and early treatment for dyslexia could be significant in preserving a person’s quality of life.